You pretty much need a second, similar system, hopefully not physically nearby. Tape doesn't scale down to home use, and optical is too small.

My home NAS has several roles, so I don't have to backup the full capacity. The family shared drive definitely needs to be backed up. The windows desktop backups probably don't, although if I had a better plan for offsite backups, I would probably include desktop backups in that. TV recordings and ripped optical discs don't need to be backed up for me, I could re-rip them and they're typically commercially available if I had a total loss; not worth the expense to host a copy of that offsite, too; IMHO.

You might do something like mirrored disks on the NAS and single copy on the backup as a cost saver, but that comes with risks too.

A cheap backup scheme:

Buy the hardware to make a lightweight backup server. Make backups work with it. Take it to your friend's place along with a bottle of scotch, plug it in, and then: Use it.

Disaster recovery is easy: Just drive over there.

Redundancy is easy: Build two, and leave them in different places.

None of this needs to happen on rented hardware in The Clown.

The low-tech and not super resilient method is to buy a second 28TB NAS, put it in a different location and sync them periodically when you know your primary is in good shape.

Back in the days of DVDs, I used to backup my 20GB drive onto DVDs. I wonder if you could do something similar today but instead of a bunch of 4GB optical disks, you would use 4 x 8TB drives?

There is 'amanda'. It will split your data up if and you can rotate a bunch of disks.

Used it years ago, we rotated disks every week or something and periodically would take one out of commission and get a new one.

I believe you can mix and match storage mediums - like have your monthly snapshot write to tape.

`zfs send --raw` of encrypted datasets to https://www.rsync.net/products/zfsintro.html.

That would cost at least 336 € per month.

Yeah, rsync.net is pricey, but in reliable.

I been using Interserver[1] + borg[2] for the last 3 years. With the 10TB plan comes out to $25/mo, but if you prepay a year there's discounts.

For the OPs use case, they have a 40TB plan for $84/mo. Still pricey, but, cheap compared to most other cloud storages. If you have data you care about, off-site backups are required.

[1] https://www.interserver.net/storage/

[2] https://borgbackup.readthedocs.io/en/stable/

AWS, GCP, and Azure all offer cold storage for about $1 per TB per month. If you want any cheaper you need to build a second NAS.

You could also take the awkward route and add one or two large drives to your desktop, mirror there, and back that up to backblaze (not B2).

The other suggestions you got for hot storage strike me as the wrong way to handle this, if you're considering $80 per year per TB for backups then just make another NAS.

For the OP - be careful with AWS, the closest pricing to one dollar per terabyte is S3 Glacier Deep Archive and you'd be surprised how expensive a full restore can be in the event that you need to do so in terms of restore pricing, egress cost, etc.

Another NAS isn't really a good solution (unless you can place it in a different house) - the goal of a cloud back up is that it's offsite.

While true that it is something to be wary of, if you restore the entire backup at full cost every two years it's still cheaper than B2.

The egress is only super high when you compare to how cheap $1 per month is.

And I bet you can find somewhere offsite for a NAS for free or a tiny fraction of $150/month.

I use Glacier alongside RAID with 4 drives so that I can recover from any single drive failure (which will happen) just by swapping in a new drive.

Had this setup ~10 years and have had to replace a drive on two occasions but never needed to restore from Glacier.

At this point even if I do need to do a Glacier restore one day it’s still going to work out to be pretty economical.

I have a NAS that has 18 TB effective storage, 36 TB mirrored. It all gets backed up to a B2 back blaze which is about six dollars per terabyte - but I'm currently only using about 8 TB at the moment so it's only about 50 bucks a month.

So this might be on the higher end of the price range if you're using up all 28 TB uncompressed since that's about $168 per month though...

if your talking cloud backup Wasabi (which uses S3) is the cheapest i could find it’s pay as you go and they don’t charge for upload/download. The pay as you go is $6.99 per TB which would be pretty pricey at 28 TB, but it’s super cheap for my 4tb NAS.

Check Storj distributed storage. Fraction of aws Storage*

$0.004 Per GB/month

For 28TB, that's $1,146.88 per month.

Hetzner gives you 20TB for around $50/month. Isn’t really redundant, but it’s certainly offsite backup.

It's a tenth of that.